Method and apparatus for efficiently reflecting complex systems of objects in XML documents

Abstract

The invention provides an efficient method and apparatus for exchanging data between two entities, such as two application programs or a resource library and an application program. The invention provides a mechanism for populating a complex object model implementation in accordance with the particular data format preferred by the receiving entity from one or more external data formats on the fly responsive to a request for data. The method and apparatus allow the registration of resource factories which can produce resources through mechanisms other than the traditional parsing of a file. One implementation of this is using the URL scheme to identify the factory to handle a request, and allowing that factory to create a specialized Java package resource.The method and apparatus allow the registration of reflection adapter factories, and specialized model classes which work with those adapters, for the purpose of computing object attributes and populating the Java package resource with them. One implementation of this mechanism is a set of Java Reflection adapters which compute the properties of JavaClass model objects from the JDK reflection API'S.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The invention pertains to the generation and retrieval of objects in an object-oriented programming environment. More particularly, the invention pertains to populating an internal object model for an application program from an external representation of those objects such as an XML document.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]It often is necessary for two application programs to exchange data with each other or for application data used by an application program to be stored in a resource library separate from the application program. For instance, certain data may be used by many different application programs. Therefore, it is efficient to store data in discrete data units (e.g., objects) in a database or other resource library that is accessible to each of the plurality of application programs that may need access to that data. Accordingly, mechanisms have been devised for efficiently transporting data between two computing entities. The two computing e...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0022]The invention provides an efficient method and apparatus for exchanging data between two computing entities, such as two application programs or a resource library and an application program. The invention provides a mechanism for populating a complex object model implementat

Problems solved by technology

The complete set of XML documents and Java code to express an application program's metadata can be extremely large and complex.

Further, the complete set of XML documents and Java code to express an application program's metadata can be extremely large and complex.

When there are multiple formats for expressing the metadata, the size and complexity of the system is further increased and, particularly, there is much more data that must be retrieved, converted, parsed, and stored.

It provides only a single format and does not address other sources of model objects.

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